Borrowed Pasts: Thirteen Revival Styles from Moorish Domes to Foam Mouldings

Moorish Revival grew out of Romanticist Orientalism, with early examples in English garden follies around 1812. Edward Blore's 1826 Alupka Palace in Crimea marked the turn toward serious architectural use, and the style became a favorite for synagogues, theaters and fraternal temples.

Jacobethan blended Elizabethan and Jacobean elements from the late 1820s. John Betjeman coined the name in 1933, and Harlaxton Manor in Lincolnshire, built from 1837 to 1855, is among its examples, with flattened Tudor arches, high chimneys and balustrades.

Byzantine Revival emerged in Western Europe in the 1840s, favoring the Greek cross plan, mosaics rather than carved stone and elongated domes. It peaked in the last quarter of the century, with Sacre-Coeur in Paris and the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia among its landmarks.

Neo-Grec merged Graeco-Roman, Pompeian, Adam and Egyptian influences into a polychrome blend, helped by the resumed excavations at Pompeii in 1848. Henri Labrouste's Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve in Paris, built from 1843 to 1850, is generally regarded as its first major public building.

Stick style, popular from roughly 1860 to 1890, applied decorative boards over clapboards to suggest medieval half-timbering without carrying any load. It sits between Carpenter Gothic and Queen Anne, and the 1874 Chicamacomico Life-Saving Station in North Carolina is a surviving example.

Chateauesque drew on French Renaissance chateaux, with towers, spires and steep roofs on asymmetrical plans. Richard Morris Hunt, the first American trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, popularized it for the Vanderbilts from the 1870s to the 1890s, and the Biltmore Estate is among its best known buildings.

Richardsonian Romanesque takes its name from Henry Hobson Richardson, whose Trinity Church in Boston, completed in 1872, is his most celebrated design. Round arches, clustered columns and rusticated stone spread west through the 1880s and influenced Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Colonial Revival is often traced to the Centennial Exhibition of 1876. Few such houses were built between about 1880 and 1910, when Queen Anne dominated, but between 1910 and 1930 roughly forty percent of American houses were built in the style.

Spanish Colonial Revival, also called Mediterranean Revival, reached its peak between 1915 and 1931 after the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego brought Bertram Goodhue and Carleton Winslow national prominence. Stucco walls, clay tile roofs and courtyards mark its buildings.

Pueblo Revival, also called Santa Fe style, imitates adobe pueblo building with thick rounded walls, projecting vigas and stepped massing. It peaked in the 1920s and 1930s, and Santa Fe's 1957 Historical Zoning Ordinance, shaped by John Gaw Meem, mandated the Old Santa Fe style for the city center.

Storybook architecture is playful and whimsical, with uneven roofs, steep rooflines evoking thatch, turrets and mismatched windows. It flourished around Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s, and Harry Oliver's 1921 Spadena House in Beverly Hills is a notable example.

Pueblo Deco fuses Art Deco with Pueblo Revival and Territorial traditions, using applied metalwork, tilework and murals. Mary Colter shaped its early development, and the KiMo Theater in Albuquerque, built in 1927, and the 1938 McKinley County Courthouse in Gallup are notable examples.

Neo-eclectic houses combine elements of several historical periods on one structure, such as Cape Cod, Tudor Revival and Chateauesque details. The style spread from the 1970s on because moldings once made of stone or plaster could be made from extruded foam finished with an EIFS stucco veneer.